The men on the chainsaws had stopped to witness the removing and there was speculation as to what it was.
It’s a bit of old waste pipe, said one. Drainage. They used to use metal.
Daniel looked at it. There was a wrongness and a loss to it being out of the ground.
It was then the man arrived. He just appeared out of the mist which seemed to emphasize the size of him. He had two terriers with him that went immediately and sniffed about the fires.
Big work, he said. The men stopped and were looking at him. He looked around them all and at Daniel.
Do you want anything rid of? he asked. He looked over at the dragged-up shard. I’m taking scrap.
No, said Daniel. I don’t need it. He knew of the big man. Knew of his reputation. He had an immediate anger that the man had come onto his land.
Them old implements? asked the man. There was a kind of unnerving thing to him, there in the mist. It was as if he had no idea of right ownership.
The dogs were yelping in and out of the reeds. He shouted at them and they quieted. It was a bizarre obedience.
No, said Daniel. Part of the scheme was that the rubbish and scrap, the old implements and machinery had to be got rid of. It unnerved him, the man coming with this timing. He was angered but knew he could not provoke the man or give him reason to feel personally aggrieved.
Nothing else? asked the man. There was a load to the question. A physical weight.
The other men were standing around. The big man had brought unease to everyone. Daniel could feel the mist slightly on his face.
No, he said.
•
When the man had gone Daniel felt a tide of adrenaline. As if he had been left a threat. The old implements were the other side of the sheep barn. It gave Daniel a fear that something of his had been coveted. He could not disassociate the man coming from the moving of the shard. As if it had conjured him.
He thought of the shard, lying there, a snapped bone. Something stricken. He wondered briefly again what it was. It worried him that there was no imagination in him. There was just a hollow, dead unknowing. Somewhere within him, the anger about the man coming onto his land.
He listened to the chainsaws he thought were from the manor farm at the base of the valley and heard the yapping of dogs, their strange sharp note. An adrenaline came up in him again. He had a sudden fear for her, a belief someone had touched her or was going to touch her and harm her again. It was inexplicable.
The big man stood at the entrance to the sett and stared as if he were following the tunnels along, assessing it.
He saw the heap of freshly scuffed soil and the drawn-out bedding outside the entrance. The sett was on a slope and looked to head deep in and there was much undergrowth and thin sycamore on the cover.
I’d need somebody else, he thought.
He went out a little from the entrance and found the dung pit that in the colder weather was often close to the sett this time of year. The fresh spores looked soft and muddy. In the mud around were scrapings and footprints and from their impress he knew it was a big full-grown boar. A sow would put up a better fight if she had cubs to defend, but there was something more competitive to the size of a big forty-pound boar.
On the nearby trees were the unhealed scars where the badgers had cleaned their claws and rubbed off the dirt from their coats.
That’s them, he thought. They’re here.
•
He followed the river back up from the woods and periodically took out a snare from his knapsack and laid it along the bank.
The water levels had dropped in the last month and the river was fringed with marsh marigold and he set the snares amongst it.
The mink were here now, annihilating the streams and watercourses. It was as well to be able to produce one if they were stopped. It was legal to hunt them, and it would explain the dogs.
When the big man got home he kenneled and fed the terriers and dressed the rat bites then went inside and made the calls.
He talked briefly and arranged that he would call if he got the badger. They wanted something heavy preferably, a real fighter. They wanted a spectacle. Then he called the other man whom he had worked with on the hunts and whom he knew had a good, big dog. He would need a big dog against the possibility of the boar.
It’s just a catch and release, the big man told him.
Can I bring my son? the man asked.
chapter three
WHEN DANIEL CAME out of the shed his mother was there. He had not heard her arrive. She had come through the cows and carried the basket that was always on her elbow with the tea towel over it. She had aged quickly some years ago and then seemed to stop and looked now like she had for years. His father had changed differently. He had seemed to be always the same but then went old very suddenly, as if he had given in under a weight.
The basket on his mother’s arm gave Daniel a strange sort of locus; he could rarely remember her coming without it. She looked him over, was sensible enough not to judge him in the clothes he was in, and they walked back to the house.
“How’s Dad?” he asked.
“Still slow with things,” she said. The stroke had split him down one side like lightning hitting an old tree. “He’s angry for you,” she said.
Daniel nodded.
They went into the house. By the time he had taken off his boots and waterproofs and come into the kitchen she was cleaning up and the kettle was boiling. He felt a slight filial guilt.
He went over to the sink and cleaned his hands under the crashing hot water, a meringue of suds lifting out of the filling bowl. His mother emptied the basket of things, putting out a box of stew, a bara brith. A handful of small rolls.
“Do you want this loaf?” she asked.
“I’ve got the bread machine,” he said. They had bought that together. It was a thing of wonder to them. There was no false politeness.
“You’re not eating.”
There was nothing to clear. Just the scuffs of butter and crumbs off the plates some toast had been on, the odd bowl of cereal. A tinned pie was his one effort at hot food, and there was evidence of the tin.
She dumped the plates into the suds and made the tea. For years this had been her kitchen, the center of the place where most of the important things of her life had happened.